This update we’re releasing some exclusive new content for players in: September’s Alpha Treasure Hunt. We’re planning on making this a habit - having some special content that is only available for a very limited time, and then never again. If you want it, you’ll have to come play and get it! This month we’re dropping a fun new trail, the elusive "Alpha Ion Trail". Fortunately, most bosses and strong enemies will drop it, so you just need to play the game normally to get it, but it is quite rare. The item is tradeable, but it won’t ever be dropped again after this event, so don’t miss out!

We’re also moving the regular stream time to Wednesdays at 3pm PST, starting with this week. Same thing, just different time. Come join us and hear about what we’re working on and coming soon.

Still can’t get enough of us? Wanna hear our birdy tweets? Well, we have a nice surprise for you! We’ve made a new twitter account, exclusively for Steambirds awesomeness! Come follow us and join in the fun here


Lots of polish happening in the land of art! In icons, the variant icons have been updated, and the weapon icons have been iterated with new bases, numbers, and rarity colors! There’s been some various VFX updates, including one to indicate damage on Meowza’s drills, an update to the raptor mine explosion, new trails, smokes trails in the rescue dungeon and tutorial dungeon, and emote updates! New emotes have been added, Greet and Rally, and the existing ones have been updated to match the art style. Lastly, on enemies, the sweeper quest has new art, and the war horse event enemy now sits upon it’s trail of bullets, instead of in them!

Outside the game, art we’ve been working on a trailer that is nearly complete! We’re excited to show it to you, so keep an eye out for that!

• We’ve rolled out the difficulty scaling we discussed last update to more content. All the dungeon bosses will now also scale up slightly, like Meowza, when you have more players fighting it.
  
• Low level items are available in the store to purchase with scrap. This is intended to give new players who have invested time (and gotten scrap) a way of recovering from their deaths a little faster. We are not selling items for gold.
  
• Updates controller configs for assault, medic, hog, and raptor so they work better with absolute controls.
  
• DPS locked treasures added to T2-T5 dungeons. Get better rewards by bringing more firepower!
  
• Phoenix hp buff: 2nd and 3rd phases have more health
  
• Elemental armor improvements: Armor values match basic armor, fusion improves elem protect from 15% => 20%
  
• Lowered overall item fusion costs for most items at Crafter building
  
• Raised usable chance on T2-T7 enemies
  
• Fixed: Daily event's now give proper increases to item drops
  
• Fixed: Bandit EMP cooldown syncs properly
  
• Tesla UR damage nerfed by 55%.
  
• Added rocket pod spawning in The Arena
  
• Reduced occurrence of Duster item drops for non-Duster classes

• Fixed health/steam exploit when quickly equipping different items
  
• Fixed bug with more than 255 cargo slots (for, ahem, a lot of storage)
  
• Fixed bug where rarely players incorrectly appear as others and lose all items
  
• Fixed some situations where the game uploaded extra data and caused lag for all those without the beefiest of upload speeds. Less beefy internet required now.
  
• Fixed a number of server stability related issues
  
• Polish: damage bars on/off option in interface menu.
  
• More logging to help catch some bullet bugs (hopefully!)
  
• Fixed some issues with dungeons starting.
  
• Polish: if it fails to spawn a dungeon from a key, it should now drop a replacement key.
  
• Polish: added target enemy level to territory labels

• Hidden unsupported hotkey: Shift+F10 to hide all UI for trailer and screenshots.
  
• Lots of new music: dungeons, crafting workshop, and loading screen.
  
• Some new explosion sound effects.

Hi folks! This update has some pretty major changes in it that we’re excited to finally roll out, starting with:

Today’s build includes a substantial rework of plane cargo. The old system had some long-standing problems:

• Difficulty moving items between planes: Players would store items on spare planes and then would need to engage in a time consuming dance in which they’d swap planes and move items to storage on a regular basis.
  
• Confusing pricing on storage slots and plane cargo: It was hard for us to come up with a fair price for additional plane cargo, which we’ve always hoped we could sell to help support the game’s development, since the old system effectively encouraged players to buy hangar slots and use planes as storage, which is not (as noted above) very convenient.

So we are trying out a new and hopefully simpler system. Now all planes share a single cargo container. When you switch planes, the cargo container is detached from the old plane and automatically bolted onto the new plane. Our feathered engineers assure us this is perfectly safe. Here’s how this plays out in practice:

• Simplified inventory management: There are now only two places to put items: Rebel City Storage and Plane Cargo. If you want to transfer items between storage and plane cargo, you no longer need to constantly swap planes.
  
• Expanded default storage: This change will make players want to put even more stuff in Rebel City Storage, and we know that many players already feel that the free storage amount is insufficient, so we've upped the default free storage to 12 spaces. All players will get their extra storage immediately - it is in addition to any storage you may have already purchased.
  
• Expanded default cargo: We've also increased the default plane cargo to 12 spaces, from the current 8, which is something we’ve wanted to do for a while anyway since some players have been very vocal about how cramped their current amount of plane cargo feels. (Reminder: If your plane goes down, you still lose *everything* in the shared cargo. Expanding it is, in that way, a bit of a mixed blessing!)
  
• Plane cargo expansions for sale: It will now be possible to purchase plane cargo, beyond the 12 spaces that everyone receives for free. Four cargo spaces (one full row) will cost 7000 gold, with a nice discount of that price the first and second time you purchase it (just like how we discount the first few purchases of Rebel City Storage.)

What happens to current players who have items spread across multiple planes?
We really didn't want to wipe your collected items in the middle of this beta test. So instead, there's a one-time migration process that will occur in which items are incrementally filtered out of old plane cargo and into the new shared cargo. It is a little weird, and might have some odd edge cases that we haven’t identified, but we figured it was better than simply doing a wipe.

1. First, all of the items currently stored in all your various plane cargo holds will be temporarily transferred into a hidden list. These items are not deleted! You just can’t see them.
   
2. Next, when you log on, we then take the first items from the hidden list and put them into your shared cargo until it is completely full.
   
3. At this point, you can move the items from your plane cargo to storage if you want to keep them.
   
4. If you drop items, or otherwise empty out your plane cargo, the next time you log in or switch planes, we will magically fill up any empty cargo space with more items from the hidden list. This process will continue until your hidden list is empty.
   
5. You’ll know your hidden list is empty when you login or switch to a plane in the hangar and there is at least one empty slot. From that point on you’ll never need to worry about the hidden list again!
   
6. After a few weeks, we’ll remove the hidden list system from the game in order to eliminate unnecessary edge cases that could hinder future development, since the hidden list serves no purpose other than to help us avoid a wipe in this one and only situation.

Another long-standing issue we’ve had in the game is that bosses become almost trivial if you have a very large group of players. When large group hits a boss, it previously would die so quickly that many players were not even able to qualify for loot. That feels bad. So in this update we’re also experimenting with some dynamic scaling, where a boss will become a little more difficult with more players.

Our goal is that more players will always be better, but you should never be able to mindlessly steamroll a boss. Right now the system scales difficulty along a curve; if you have 10 players instead of just 1, the boss might have just 50% more health. Not 10x health, because we always want you to be happy that you have your friends around. The scaling is dynamic and will adjust automatically if players join or leave the boss fight.

We’re still playing with these numbers, and for now we’re testing this only on Meowza. Our suspicion is that difficulty scaling will be especially important near launch when the servers will be a lot busier. Let us know if you think this scaling works well, we’re eager to get some feedback!


There’s a totally cool trailer happening behind the scenes, the bird rebels are looking their coolest, we can’t wait to show it to you. Not so behind the scenes, the raceboss has new art and quest enemies are getting shined up as well!

• Added Copper and Dark Steel to quest drops
  
• Buffed Meowza health a bit
  
• Buff arc guns
  
• Buff to bandit fire (+15%)
  
• Fixed broken daily event loot
  
• Fixed trail DPS
  
• Fixed Goose mission
  
• Fixed Greater Pooper mission
  
• Fixed treasure sniping exploit/troll
  
• Fixed loot drop holes
  
• Added engines to basic recipes

• Polish: new inventory item move menu
  
• Polish: setting to disable red near-death bars
  
• Fixed Ol’ Faithful tutorial bug
  
• Fixed bug with plane color conversion (prevented some old accounts from logging in)
  
• Fixed bug with overridden quest goals (for special quest goals that don’t follow the regular format)
  
• Fixed self-friend bug: it was possible to self-friend.
  
• Fixed local ip/port issues that might affect joining servers
  Invisible bullets have more logging and one potential cause fixed.
  
• Fixed more causes of duplicate bullets
  
• Fixed bug where you could 'equip' quest items from storage, which would basically throw them into the aether
  
• Fixed bug where inventory items are vertically offset if you try use an unusable item
  
• Fixed bug where planes wouldn't undock from buildings sometimes
  
• Fixed health/steam exploit with quickly equipping different items
  
• Polished automatic quality adjustment to be more robust and (hopefully) less likely to cause undesired downgrades. Should only be in effect for the first 5 minutes of play.
  
• Fixed leak with bullet particle emitters.
  
• Players are no longer able to teleport to themselves.
  
• Fixed some missing sound bugs.
  
• Fixed an issue with analytics, where we would potentially lose up to 90% of them in some situations.

• Audio: lots of new sound effects!

It’s been an exciting 2 weeks. We’ve had a significant influx of new players (and some returning old faces). Welcome everyone, we hope you enjoy this world we’ve been making! With all the new players joining at almost the same time, we had a few rough patches at the start (sorry about those!), but we think we’ve ironed out most of the big issues now (crossing talons!)

If you missed the opportunity to get a key this round, the weekly stream is the best way to get a chance at one. Come join us and answer an easy question to get your shot!


More polish shines across the game; bosses are getting upgraded including the escort boss and the berserker boss being animated and four new boss environments added and existing ones being polished. Some more props have been added to the Rebel City and you should keep an eye out for the helicopter using that landing pad! In addition to this icons are being polished in the background and new emotes have been added; “Charge,” “Disco,” and, “Warning.”

• Added elemental properties to Ancient Arena
  
• Added tiers and upgrades to elemental armor. They now drop at T8 and are upgraded via fusion to T10
  
• T10s no longer drop from Dungeon entrance set pieces and minions in The Dig.
  
• Added Copper, a material used to craft basic T8. Copper is rewarded for T8+ daily quests.
  
• Added crafting recipes that allow players to craft basic T8 weapons, engines, and armor using Copper.
  
• 2 new Sunday bounties ("Meowza" and "SN-Z"). Rewards Dark Steel, which can be used to upgrade Boss Untiereds

We’ve selectively zoomed out a bit during regular overworld interactions and a bit more during boss fights. You should now be able to see more around you than before. This is something that we’ve wanted to do for a while, but we were held back by performance concerns. But with all the recent performance optimization work that we did, it was now feasible to attempt it, so attempt it we have. We'd love to hear feedback on the change!

• A bowl of nice piping hot bug fixes to keep the servers up for all the new players
  
• Plane inventory context menu
  
  • Equip, drop and move are now actions in a submenu in the inventory
    
  • You can re-order the items in your inventory to make better use of hotkeys
    
  • Hopefully fewer mistake drops of items!
    
• Show item panel for quest (or crafting) reward if it’s just one item
  
• Fixed bounty quest scheduling, so bounties should now be up for a full 24 hours, as per the writing on the packet. Good luck with your bountifying
  
• Automatic performance adjustment. If you’re getting a low framerate, this will try lower your graphics settings and hopefully make things more playable. Can be disabled from options.
  
• Bugfix: prevented unused bullet pools having thousands of idle objects
  
• Improvements and polish to the store previews and paints. Try on all the colors at the same time!
  
• Slightly more verbose LNCxx error messages, so you have a better idea of why a problem might be happening
  
• Polish: show nexus in background during “events and news” on login
  
• Polish: add more reminders to use the 'drop trash' key
  
• New “What’s Early Access?” popup on login (can be disabled in options), to remind players that changes are still coming in fast and hot.
  
• Fixed an issue where broken game servers could “pile up” and clog the system
  
• Polish: trails in the store now have a proper preview
  
• Added defensive approach to dealing with bullets having extra particle emitters - hopefully these should be resolved now.

• Some simple monitoring to try detect server outages
  
• Bug reports include a mini GIF (to help debugging) - this was improved a bit.
  
• More logging for dungeon key uses, so we can hopefully better diagnose any issues
  
• Moved a bunch of config text to localizable files, for the future

The big visible change this week is the new Rebel City. Unfortunately the cat radars were getting more advanced and regularly able to track us down, but fortunately we found a lovely new home that’s much better hidden. It may be disguised as a mountain. Shhh! Don’t tell the cats about it!

The other noticeable piece of news is that we’re moving to a 2-week update schedule. We hope this will reduce the overheads of updating the game every week, but still keep it regular enough so you get nice meaty changes on a regular interval. Don’t fret, we’ll still keep streaming every week, so you can tune in on Wednesdays to hear more details about what’s in store.

We’ve just recently sent out a newsletter with details on how to get a Steam key. So for all of those eager to get a key and join the game now: check those inboxes! We should be sending out codes very soon.


In addition to the shiny new Rebel City, there’s been iteration on the trails to make it so that they don’t overwhelm us when there’s a bunch on screen. We’ve also shined up the emotes; the wings and the epic fireworks are looking extra cool now. The trails and the emotes should make their way into the shop in the next couple weeks!

Feathered and furred alike are getting new portraits with 3 more player portraits in, each with 3 color variations, in addition to 5 enemy boss portraits finishing up and more getting concepted. Your enemies will have a face soon! Here’s a sneak peak of the egyptian boss:



The thunderboss Rei, is now modelled, rigged, animated, and has some preliminary special effects for his lightning in the game, and a few quest enemies around the world have been getting unique models.

• Rei is now live and is spawning on the island as an event boss

• Fixed an exploit where you could potentially equip an item of the wrong class
  
• Fix class unlock blueprints - you should once again see a nice blueprint and notification when you unlock a new class.
  
• Crafting improvements:
  
  • Couple small tweaks and improvements so crafting recipes look slightly less like quests and more like a crafting system
    
  • 2-color progress bars (handed in and what you can hand in now)
    
  • Auto-accept a crafting quest and show UI as if you can immediately hand in items. There’s now less difference between the two states for crafting recipes
    
  • Sort “acquired” to top (incl those w/ items you can hand in to start now)
    
• Some backend bugfixes, to help keep the servers running smoothly
  
• Finish up "Try On" button in store and make public in this build - try on those paints!
  
  • Add "Previewing" text and list of paints currently being tried on/previewed to the store popup
    

• Analytics finished. But who will track the trackers?

This is the first of our Steam posts, but you can also check out our back-catalogue of blog posts on our blog: https://community.steambirds.com/news

The servers are still open for the private beta, and it’s been lovely seeing all you fine feathered friends online. We will be sending out an email to all newsletter subscribers with a way to get a way to get a key, so if you still want a key, be sure to sign up there ASAP! We look forward to welcoming more of you very soon.




There’s a lot of thinking and planning happening with the art team right now! We’re living in a conceptual wonderland; a rough concept version of the upcoming Rebel City rebuild has been implemented, it will inform the design of the final city we see in the future! In addition, the enemy portraits are getting sketched out with concepts popping up for your favorite bosses. You’ll have faces to associate with their taunting dialogue before too long.

• T9 and T10 items will drop more rarely, but can be created via crafting
  
• Untiered guns can now be upgraded into better guns using crafting/fusion! By gathering resources from the different daily events, you can craft weapons or upgrade special guns to make them stronger.
  
• Added 130 gun crafting fusion recipes
  
• Merlin buff: Increase in gun damage
  
• Arc weapons have slightly less cool down
  
• Bandit buff: Increase in damage, more damage on stunner bullet

• Add new "Try On" button in Paint Store
  
  • players can now try on multiple paints without buying them
    
  • tried on paints have no effect on player's actual plane, leaving the Store resets it
    
• Lots of testing and many tiny bug fixes for and during the start of private beta
  
• New /give command, for admins to give players (including themselves) items, instead of dropping on the ground.
  
• Bugfix for being stuck in the Hangar. This should finally be resolved, please report a bug if you see this happening again!
  
• Performance work continues. This week we’ve fixed a few memory leaks and related slowdowns, and a number of other smaller optimizations.
  
• Fixed bug where bullets that were already invisible weren’t being removed correctly
  
• Discovered/fixed bug with viewpoint cleanup.
  
• Moved chat to its own canvas to avoid entire UI re-layouts.
  
• Improved decoration and enemy unit efficiency

• Auditing work continues. 2 fast 2 auditing.